Unseen Friends / 未曾谋面的朋友

I have always been observant, trying to discover out-of-the-ordinary in ordinary life, and one particular phenomenon has caught my attention: the social media that most of us grown addicted to, is nothing but social. Many friends that we chat with online only exist on our contact lists, and we have never met them in person. It seems that when we open our computers, it’s our doors we shut. This may be only a small part of the surreality of modern life.

For this project, Me and My Unseen Friends, I first reconnected with my “contact-list friends”, asked for some of their photos. I then found the same settings where these photos were taken, took a picture of myself in the same place, and finally photographed myself into their photos. The result is an illusion that we have met before, yet the unavoidable mismatch betrays a fictional and synthetic touch and the estrangement between us.